Wrapping Up Dreamforce 2013

Jon KennyDecember 3, 2013

Things are now starting to return to normal after a huge Dreamforce week in San Francisco so it’s time to start thinking about how to apply some of the new information we picked up over there. Here are some of my thoughts and conclusions from my experience of the week.

The big announcement of the week was the release of Salesforce1 which is the latest edition of Salesforce's mobile strategy. Mobile is an area where I have felt Salesforce have been well behind where they needed to be. Some comments that Marc Benioff and Parker Harris made in their final Q&A session of the conference suggested that they too were less than happy with their mobile offering to date. If Salesforce1 does what they say it does, it should close this gap which will be great. I have spoken to some clients who have started using it and feedback so far has been positive. I plan to do some experimentation with it in the coming weeks and write about it here. Team Trineo has also already done some work with it which you can see here.

Another area where it looks like Salesforce have been doing a lot of work is in the Heroku, in particular around integrating Heroku and Salesforce.com. For Trineo this is great. As a Heroku Gold Partner we've already had experience integrating the two platforms. Some of the features demonstrated this week will make our work in this space much simpler allowing us to focus more on building innovative solutions rather than integrating two platforms.

DreamForce was a massive event. Any event with +130,000 registered attendees is going to have with it a huge amount of hype. Behind all this hype I feel there is genuine excitement and massive opportunities to build amazing solutions. I'm particularly excited about platform developments Salesforce1, Heroku, Heroku + Salesforce etc. At Trineo we tend to go after more complex Salesforce implementations that often involve integrations or development beyond custom objects and VisualForce pages. A number of the new platform features I saw demonstrated during the week will be useful in these cases.

Finally, I can’t summarise my thoughts on Dreamforce without mentioning the two Trineo presentations. I have had unsolicited positive feedback on both but would like to draw particular attention to the webhooks presentation delivered by two of our developers Luke and James. Anybody who has ever delivered a demonstration before knows how hard it can be. To write code as you demonstrate it and keep the audience engaged is amazing. Well done lads.